Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1990, the Czech-born composer Karel Husa returned to his home town of Prague to conduct a concert of his own music after more than forty years in exile. Husa had left Prague in 1948 after the post-War communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, and in 1954 accepted a teaching post at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He was granted U.S. citizenship in 1959. On the night of August 20, 1968, Husa learned to his dismay that troops from the Soviet Union had invaded his homeland to suppress a growing Czech democratic movement. In a matter of months, Husa completed a work for wind ensemble entitled “Music for Prague, 1968.” It was a powerful work, inspired by powerful emotions, and it soon became a classic of wind band repertory. At the festive concert in Prague's Smetana Hall on February 13, 1990, broadcast nationwide by Czech radio and television networks, Husa conducted the Czechoslovak premiere of “Music for Prague 1968,” a composition that had received thousands of performances all over the world, but none, until that night, in the city that inspired it. One of Husa’s American students, the composer Thomas Duffy, travelled to Prague to attend the concert. “Husa conducted the piece vigorously,” Duffy recalled, and after the performance noted that, “Twice, when I felt that the volume of applause was already overwhelming, Husa presented the V for victory sign to the house—and the volume doubled.”